St Mary's Abbey, York

St. Mary's Abbey

Ruins of St Mary's Abbey Church
Monastery information
Order	Benedictine
Established	1088
Disestablished	1539
Dedicated to	St. Mary
Diocese	York
People
Founder(s)	Stephen of Whitby, Alan Rufus, William II of England, William the Conqueror
Site
Location	York, Yorkshire, England
Coordinates
Visible remains	Hospitium, precinct walls, gatehouse, abbey church (ruins with part of the nave and crossing still standing), abbot's house (substantially altered); statues and other remains in the Yorkshire Museum.
Public access	yes (Museum Gardens)

The Abbey of St Mary is a ruined Benedictine abbey in York, England and a Grade I listed building.

History

Once the richest abbey in the north of England, it lies in what are now the Yorkshire Museum Gardens, on a steeply-sloping site to the west of York Minster.

The original church on the site was founded in 1055 and dedicated to Saint Olaf II of Norway. The abbey church was refounded in 1088 for Abbot Stephen and a group of monks from Whitby by the Anglo-Breton magnate Alan Rufus, who laid the foundation stone of the Norman church in January or February that year. The foundation ceremony was attended by bishop Odo of Bayeux and Archbishop Thomas of Bayeux. The monks moved to York from a site at Lastingham in Ryedale in the 1080s and are recorded there in Domesday. Following a dispute and riot in 1132, a party of reform-minded monks left to establish the Cistercian monastery of Fountains Abbey. The surviving ruins date from a rebuilding programme begun in 1271 and finished by 1294.

Ruins of the abbey church from the southern end

Precinct

The abbey occupied an extensive, precinct site immediately outside the city walls, between Bootham and the River Ouse. The original boundary included a ditch and a narrow strip of ground, but the walled circuit was constructed above this in the 1260s in the Abbacy of Simon de Warwick; the walls were nearly three-quarters of a mile long. In 1318 the abbot received royal permission to raise the height of the wall and crenelate it; a stretch of this wall still runs along Bootham and Marygate to the River Ouse.

The gatehouse in Marygate and its lodge formed part of a range of buildings that linked to the older church of St Olave by a chapel dedicated to Mary. Though work on the chapel and gatehouse was under way 1314 and completed in 1320, the surviving structures are mostly of fifteenth-century origin.

Abbey Church

The abbey church is aligned northeast-southwest, due to restrictions of the site. The original Norman church had an apsidal liturgical east end, and its side aisles ended in apses, though they were square on the exterior. Rebuilding began in 1270, under the direction of Abbot Simon de Warwick, and was swiftly completed during a single twenty-four year building campaign, such was the financial strength of the abbey. The completed abbey church was 350 ft in length, consisted of a nave with aisles, north and south trancepts with chapels in an eastern aisle, and a presbytery with aisles. To the east of the cloister and on the line of the transepts were a vestibule leading to the chapter house, the scriptorium and library. Beyond the church lay the kitchen, novices' building and infirmary. The Abbey chronicle (which has not been fully translated from Latin) names the project officers as Simon de Warwick, a monk administrator and the master stonemason Master Simon, all of whom were still alive upon the completion of the project in 1294.

The Abbots House

The abbot's house, built of brick in 1483, survived as the "King's Manor" because it became the seat of the Council of the North in 1539; the abbots of St Mary's and the abbey featured in the medieval and early modern ballads of Robin Hood, with the abbot usually as Robin Hood's nemesis).

The abbot's house

In August 1513 the Abbot supplied four chests for the use of Philip Tilney treasurer of the English army before the battle of Flodden. The Abbey seems to have become the accounting office for the army in the north, involving Thomas Magnus Archdeacon of the East Riding and two monks of the abbey, Richard Wode and Richard Rypon.

The Dissolution

St Mary's, the largest and richest Benedictine establishment in the north of England and one of the largest landholders in Yorkshire, was worth over £2,000 a year, (£ in 2024), when it was valued in 1539, during the dissolution of the monasteries under Henry VIII; it was closed and subsequently substantially destroyed. On 26 November 1539 the Abbey surrendered £2,085 and 50 monks to the crown.

Abbots of St. Mary's

The abbots of St. Mary's were similar in prestige to the Archbishop of York, being entitled to wear a mitre and having a seat in Parliament (allowing them the style "My Lord Abbot"). In total there were 30 Abbots, including:

Abbot	Dates of Abbacy	Notes
Stephen of Whitby	1088–1112
Richard	1112–1131
Gaufried	1131–1133	Seceded
Severinus (or Savaricus)
Clement	1161–1184
Robert de Harpham	1184–1189
Robery de Longo Campo	1189–1194	Deposed
William de Roundel	? – 1239
Thomas de Warthill
Simon de Warwick	1258–1296	Major rebuilding programme
Benedict de Malton	1296–1303
John de Gilling	1303–1313
Alan de Wasse	1313–1331
Thomas de Malton	1331–1359
William de Mary's	1359–1382
William de Bradford	1382–1389
Thomas de Staynesgrave	1389–1398
Thomas de Pygott	1398–1405
Thomas de Spoffoth
William Dalton	? – 1423
William Welly (or Wells)	? – 1436	Resigned
Roger Kyrkby (or Kiby)
John cottingham
Thomas Bothe	? – 1485
William Sevyr		Later Bishop of Durham 1502–1505
Robert Warhop	? – 1507
Edmund Thornton
Edmund Whalley
William Thornton	c.1530 – 1540	Abbot during the Dissolution of the Monasteries

Remains

Painting of the surviving ruins by Michael Angelo Rooker in 1778

Visible remains of St Mary's Abbey, York

All that remains today are the north and west walls, plus a few other remnants: the half-timbered Pilgrims' Hospitium, the West Gate and the 14th-century timber-framed Abbot's House (now called the King's Manor). The walls include interval towers along the north and west stretches, St Mary's Tower at the northwest corner and a polygonal water tower by the river. Much stone was removed from the site in the 18th century, in 1705 for St. Olave's Church, between 1717–1720 for Beverley Minster, and in 1736 for the landing stage of Lendal Ferry.

The Yorkshire Museum, built for the Yorkshire Philosophical Society, stands in part of the abbey cloister; parts of the east, south and west cloister walls were temporarily excavated in 1827–29 preparatory to digging the museum's foundations. The relationship between the Museum and abbey is historically quite intimate as part of the richly carved chapter house vestibule (c. 1298–1307) survives incorporated into Tempest Anderson Hall lecture theatre (1911–12). Additionally, excavations of the chapter house were undertaken in 1912 by the honorary curator of Medieval archaeology, Walter Harvey-Brook who, along with Edwin Ridsdale Tate designed and developed the Museum of Medieval Architecture on the site and retained aspects of the warming house and late twelfth-century chapter house for display. Further excavations in the abbey were undertaken in 1952–56 by the then Keeper of the Yorkshire Museum, George Willmot who encountered the pre-Norman and Roman layers beneath the west wing of the nave.

The remains of the Abbey were described by Edwin Ridsdale Tate in a 1929 publication in which he asserted that: "Nowhere in England is there another spot so full of charm as York and where in York is there a more charming spot than the Gardens of the Philosophical Society, in which stand the beautiful fragments of that once powerful and noble monastery of St. Mary's. Here we must leave the venerable pile in the evening of its glory."

See also

• History of York
• Grade I listed churches in the East Riding of Yorkshire and the City of York
• List of monasteries dissolved by Henry VIII of England
• York City Walls
• York Museum Gardens

External links

• History of York: St Mary's Abbey
• The Yorkshire Museum and Gardens website